Alexander Gavrilovich Shliapnikov was a Russian communist revolutionary, metalworker, and trade union leader. He is best remembered as a memoirist of the October Revolution of 1917 and as the leader of one of the primary opposition movements inside the Russian Communist Party during the 1920s.
Biography
Early years
Alexander Shliapnikov was born August 30, 1885, in Murom, Russian Empire to a poor family of the Old Believer religion. His father died when he was a small child. Shliapnikov began factory work at age thirteen and became a revolutionary at age sixteen.
Revolutions
1905
He joined the Bolsheviks in 1903. He was arrested and imprisoned at various times for his radical political activities, including his involvement in the 1905 revolution. Shliapnikov left Russia in 1908 and continued his revolutionary activities in Western Europe, where he also worked in factories and was a devoted trade unionist.
Following the October Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power, Shliapnikov was appointed Commissar of Labor. Shliapnikov supported a coalition government composed of left socialist parties, which never came to fruition, with the parties clashing over priorities. He played an important role in evacuating industry from Petrograd, as the Germans approached in 1918. As Commissar of Labor, he helped draft important directives on workers' control of industry and nationalization of industry and he staffed government bureaucracies with staff from trade unions. In the summer of 1918, he went to the south of Russia on a mission to gather food for the population of the Bolshevik-controlled cities of central Russia. In December 1918 Shliapnikov was replaced as Commissar of Labor by Vasili Schmidt and then served as Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Caspian-Caucasian Front in the Russian Civil War. He also served in the Revolutionary Military Council of the Western Front during the Civil War. During the Civil War, Shliapnikov began to criticize the increasing tendency of the Russian Communist Party and Soviet government to rely on authoritarian measures to enforce policies towards industry and industrial workers. To Shliapnikov, denial of workers' right to participate in economic decision-making was a step away from the goals of the 1917 revolution.
Opposition leader
Shliapnikov became leader of the Workers' Opposition movement inside the Russian Communist Party. Alexandra Kollontai was a mentor and advocate of the group, which was composed of leaders of trade unions and industry who were all former industrial workers, usually metalworkers. This movement advocated the role of workers, organized in trade unions, in managing the economy and the political party. The Russian Communist Party leaders succeeded in suppressing the Workers' Opposition and in 1921–22 finally subordinated trade union leadership to the Party. In 1921, Shliapnikov was forced out of his elected post as chairman of the Metalworkers' Union. In 1922, Shliapnikov and some other trade-unionists from within and outside the Workers' Opposition, supported by Alexandra Kollontai, presented an appeal, called the Letter of the Twenty-Two, to the Communist International Executive, requesting that the Comintern help heal a "rift" within the Russian Communist Party between Party leaders and workers. Party leaders and Party-controlled media condemned the appeal. Two of the signatories of the appeal were expelled from the Party, but Shliapnikov, Kollontai, and Sergei Medvedev narrowly escaped expulsion. Shliapnikov turned to writing his memoirs and held jobs in metals import and economic planning institutions. The PartyCentral Control Commission investigated him and Sergei Medvedev in 1926 and in 1930 for alleged factionalism in connection with the formation of oppositionist groups among workers in Baku and Omsk. In 1930, the Party Politburo forced Shliapnikov to publish a public confession of "political errors" in writing his memoirs of the revolution. This was not the same as a confession of political errors committed by him since the revolution.
Death and legacy
Shliapnikov was expelled from the Communist Party in 1933 and imprisoned in 1935 for alleged political crimes. Charged under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code, he did not confess guilt or implicate others. Nevertheless, he was found guilty, based on others' testimony, and he was executed on September 2, 1937. His wife was also arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison, while their three children were dispatched to separate orphanages, being only later permitted to reunite. In 1948–1951 all three children, who were not older than 20, and their mother were arrested during a new wave of terror and sentenced to prison camp in Siberia, the only female child, Irina, getting her sentence immediately changed to internal exile in Krasnoyarsk. They were all released in the mid-1950s. Shliapnikov was posthumously rehabilitated in 1963 and restored to membership in the Communist Party in 1988.
